Nand Kishore Chaudhary built a runaway success by working closely with India’s poorest citizens, and by developing an apprenticeship system around India’s chronic battles with child labor. How do such difficult pieces fit into India’s puzzle?

By CATHRYN JAKOBSON RAMIN

For Nand Kishore Chaudhary, founder of Jaipur Rugs Company, working with India's impoverished rural artisans has been a long-standing passion. “It made me feel happy and content inside to spend all my time with them, and to think about them,” he says. photo courtesy of Jaipur Rugs Co.

He is a quiet man, and slight, wearing a well-worn white dress shirt with the collar buttoned all the way up to the neck. On a Sunday night in January, the two of us are sitting at a battered conference table at his company’s head office, in Jaipur, India, in what is rapidly becoming an unnerving silence. Nand Kishore Chaudhary’s limited English leaves him reluctant to speak, which makes me all the more curious about him and his work. From what I’ve been able to learn thus far, for the last four decades this man has built a big, highly successful company—essentially, by listening to his heart.

Back in 1978, long before terms like “corporate social responsibility,” “fair trade,” and “sustainability” became part of the popular conversation, Chaudhary set out to improve the lives of rural artisans—and, in particular, to empower large numbers of disenfranchised women of rural India. The enterprise he built, Jaipur Rugs Company (JRC), now dominates the hand-knotted carpet manufacturing and exporting business across the continent’s broad belly and well into the north.

After sorting, washing, drying in the sun, and blending, the wool is repacked in burlap sacks and sent for carding and spinning. JRC provides the only source of employment for 5,000 women in Bikaner, an arid region of sand dunes where there is little water, and hence no agriculture. photo courtesy of Jaipur Rugs Co.

“Although many companies do not recognize this, sustainability is not only about protecting the environment, and economic stability,” Chaudhary says. “It’s about bringing dignity into the lives of people.”

Chaudhary’s success is legendary. He established 6,000 hand-looms in 600 villages that lie in some of the most impoverished regions of India. His rugs are sold in 45 countries; just in the U.S., JRC has 5,000 retail clients—a customer base that has resulted in a fast growth-curve, with sales of $20 million in 2017. Over the course of a year, his company engages approximately 40,000 people, more than 80 percent of whom are female.

But the most astounding part of Chaudhary’s formula may be how closely he has worked with India’s lowest class of citizens. To Chaudhary, this was simply common sense—and the only way to honor the true meaning of sustainability. “Although many companies do not recognize this, sustainability is not only about protecting the environment, and economic stability,” he says. “It’s about bringing dignity into the lives of people.”

In building this third leg of sustainability, Chaudhary found a deep source of inspiration. “I think the most perfect place for me is in the villages,” he says. “I enjoy very much working with those people. I learned the wisdom from them. The more connected we are with them, then things get much easier.”

But how could it be easy, in a country famously structured around a strict caste system, to build a business with society’s least educated class? To do so, Chaudhary also has had to work in an industry dogged by child-labor issues. I wanted to know how he had managed to navigate these dark waters.

The mud vessels on the right, called kalash, are used for food preparation, but they’re also considered auspicious. In the Vedas, the empty pot symbolizes the earth; the water that fills it represents divine life force. Together, they symbolize immortality. photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

CAST OUT, AMONG OUTCASTS

The Dalit, formerly called “Untouchables,” are considered “impure and polluting” and are therefore excluded, and isolated. In one case, an educated Dalit who grew a mustache and fashioned it like Dali was beaten up. In Gujarat, a young man who fancied a horse was brutally murdered.

As a young man, in his hometown of Churu, deep in the desert region of Rajasthan, Chaudhary worked as a salesman in his family’s shoe shop, but hated it. Then, to his family’s dismay, he turned down a job at a bank.

One day, in 1975, a young British art historian named Ilay Cooper, who was traveling across India on a second-hand bicycle, wandered into the shoe shop. He and Chaudhary struck up what would become an enduring friendship. Cooper had cycled through the most inaccessible parts of northwestern India, encountering a tribal population that faced rampant discrimination and deep, generational poverty. While traveling through a series of “painted towns”—merchants’ houses with wall after wall of meticulously painted patterns—Cooper recognized that the region’s once-robust design tradition had been largely abandoned. Pained by this loss, Cooper encouraged Chaudhary to think about making his future in handmade carpets—and to do so in a place where there were few options for employment beyond seasonal farming and breaking rocks for construction.

Heaps of trash are the norm in India, and the Dalit (formerly called “Untouchables”) is the caste assigned to get rid of them. It falls to the Dalit to manage the majority of India’s unpleasant jobs, including cleaning latrines and removing dead animals. To keep Dalits in these menial roles, members of higher castes make it impossible for them to save money, or to own anything of even minimal value. photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

After the wool is carded into a lefa, its fibers untangled and smoothed, it’s spun on a churka, often made from a discarded bicycle wheel. For Dalits, owning more than rudimentary possessions remains a risky proposition. They have been murdered for owning even the smallest plot of land, a watch, or a pair of shoes. photo courtesy of Jaipur Rugs Co.

When Chaudhary presented the idea to his family (who were firmly entrenched in the merchant caste), they were furious; they wanted nothing to do with handwork, which was generally done by those at the bottom of India’s social ladder. But Chaudhary felt he had nothing to lose. “My whole family was very different from me,” he says. “They were not so innocent, or honest. I thought they were hypocrites, and most of them didn’t like me.”

Determined to start a business of his own, Chaudhary coaxed his father into giving him a $200 loan, which he used to buy two hand-looms and a motor scooter. But when he set nine male weavers to work inside the courtyard of his home, the objections were loud and immediate. “My own family, my friends, my neighbors tried to stop me,” Chaudhary says. “They told me that I could not work with the untouchable people, but this did not make sense to me. The people I was working with, they had been rejected by society. Nobody was taking care of them.”

THE UNTOUCHABLES’ LEGACY

The week before I visited one of the villages of weavers who work with Jaipur Rugs, I was asked by Meghna Jain, head of research and corporate communication for the company at the time, if I would eat lunch prepared by the weavers. This puzzled me—why would I refuse a delicious home-made meal?

I soon learned that, like 90 percent of JRC’s rug-makers, the residents of this village (Aaspura) are Dalit—the name now used to describe India’s poorest and most marginalized class of citizens, a group long called “Untouchables.” Although the government banned this pejorative classification in 1947, it has stubbornly stuck.

Once deductions were made for food and water, medicine, and errors in their work, children were paid about 11 cents an hour.

In Sanskrit, Dalit means “broken, ground-down, downtrodden, or oppressed.” One out of every six Indians is Dalit, and thereby relegated to the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system (which is led by the Brahmins, then followed by the Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, and finally Dalit).

According to the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, throughout much of Indian society, Dalit are traditionally considered “impure and polluting and are therefore physically and socially excluded and isolated.” And it can be worse. “They are murdered for wearing a watch or footwear,” says Sujatha Gidla, author of “Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India.” In an email, Gidla offered the following examples: “There is a case of an educated, untouchable man who grew his mustache and fashioned it like Dali. He was beaten up. A young man who fancied owning a horse was brutally murdered in Gujarat.”

Typically, Dalit may not enter non-Dalit homes, eat with members of higher castes, enter temples, or sit in proximity to those above them. Most Indians from the higher castes would not accept food from a Dalit kitchen.

Aaspura has a government-run school nearby, for children 6-14 years old. About 40 percent of students across India go on to secondary school, but in remote areas education beyond the primary level is rare. A World Bank survey found that a quarter of government primary school teachers are typically absent. photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

The traditional reason for this restriction, which usually goes unmentioned, is that in India, where every second person relieves himself outdoors, “manual scavenging”—removing untreated human excreta from bucket toilets and tin plates, and transferring to baskets that are carried to disposal locations— is the traditional occupation of the Dalit (and one of the few jobs available to them). There are standard toilet rooms, of course, often installed with government funds—but in many Indian communities, both urban and rural, indoor toilets are considered unpleasant and unhealthy.

After we had visited some of the homes in Aaspura, when it was time to have lunch Meghna Jain and I peeked into the village’s communal kitchen—a space about five by six feet in dimension, equipped with a large tank of propane that fueled a shiny, two-burner, gas range. Several women squatted close to the floor, frying the crispy, crunchy shakarpara, which are made from milk, sugar, flour, and ghee in the hottest oil. As I gobbled my curry, followed by the shakarpara, the women watched me through their scarves, from around the edges of a doorway, apparently amazed at my willingness to take food from their hands.

Keeping families together is one of JRC’s goals. “We want to pay them double or triple of what they are earning in agriculture or construction,” says Chaudhary, “so they can have a dignified life, and they can stay at home.” photo courtesy of Jaipur Rugs Co.

THREE YEARS, 3,000 WEAVERS

Soon after Chaudhary had launched his business, his friend, Ilay Cooper, offered another suggestion. Chaudhary should train and employ women and girls, who were not permitted to attend school, make household decisions, or move about without being supervised by a male relative. Chaudhary thought of his wife, Sulochana. His Churu relatives treated her poorly, and given the status quo, his daughters would not fare much better.

By 1986, Chaudhary’s weavers were producing enough rugs to allow him to start an export business (and to take on his younger brother as an assistant). To expand further, Chaudhary and his family left Churu for Gujarat, one of the poorest regions in India.

When Chaudhary arrived in Gujarat, the villagers, not understanding his intentions, greeted him by brandishing weapons and threatening his family. To convince them that he meant no harm, on his subsequent visits Chaudhary brought his young daughters with him, fording rivers and barely passable dirt roads to reach inaccessible villages. Slowly, word spread that Chaudhary came in peace—and with employment opportunities. After three years, he had done more than gain people’s trust; he had trained 3,000 weavers, increasing his production more than ten-fold—enough to warrant another move, this time to Jaipur, a more cosmopolitan hub.

The rooftops of buildings in rural villages in north India belong mostly to women and children, who use them as outdoor living rooms, spreading blankets and mats on the floor. Here, they can relax, laugh, catch up on local gossip, and, for Artisan Originals weavers, plan their next project. photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

The Art and Craft of a Hand-Knotted Rug(Click on any photo below to enter full-screen slideshow)

THE HUMAN COST OF INEFFICIENCY

Traditionally—because of the complexity of the global rug supply chain, and the vast distances involved—Indian carpet exporters doled out each stage of production to contractors and subcontractors. This created a parade of middlemen who managed the intricacies of acquiring raw materials, spinning, dyeing, weaving, finishing, and finally, distribution. [For a glimpse of each step in this process, see our photo gallery, “The Art and Craft of a Hand-Knotted Rug.”] Meanwhile, the artisans who actually made the rugs were treated like faceless weaving machines, receiving miniscule and unpredictable wages that left them constantly on the verge of ruin.

To survive in such a system, the artisans took loans from the middlemen at unspecified interest rates, which were repaid from their wages, further diminishing their income. It was only a matter of time before a family needed another advance; if someone died or left the village, the debt was transferred from one generation to the next. In many cases, parents had to send their children to work in a carpet factory (after accepting a small advance payment from a persuasive but often dishonest recruiter who worked for a factory owner). Once deductions were made for food and water, medicine, and errors in their work, children were paid about 11 cents an hour. [For a summary of rug-making’s long and fascinating history in India, see our sidebar, “The Circuitous History of India’s Hand-Made Carpets.”]

“TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE ACCOUNTING”

Finding this system abhorrent, Chaudhary adopted a policy of no loans, and no middlemen. And he wanted the women he worked with to take charge of their own futures. These ambitions meant having to create his own extended supply chain, and manage it step by step. It took Chaudhary years to accomplish this, but once his system was in place, with no middlemen to take their cut, Jaipur Rugs became more profitable.

Until Jaipur Rugs offered village women the opportunity to create their own designs, they’d largely lost touch with their artisanal heritage. But throughout rural settlements like Aaspura, vestiges of the villagers’ artistic sensibility remain. The gold-leaf embellishment on this once-elegant façade is a typical example. photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

This allowed Chaudhary to raise his weavers’ wages, JRC says, to double what others paid, and still remain competitive in the upper range of the hand-knotted rug market. At retail, most of JRC’s top-of-the-line wool and silk rugs cost about the same as comparable high-end hand-knotted rugs from other companies, between $5-$8,000 for a rug that measures 8’x10’. JRC is less forthcoming about its weavers’ wages, so the best information I could find was in a 10-year-old study, by C.K. Prahalad, the late Professor of Corporate Strategy at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. In 2008, Prahalad reported, JRC weavers were paid between 1,300 and 3,000 Rupees, which at that time equated to $28 to $65 a month. While these wages seem meager, Prahalad found they were roughly twice what other handcrafts paid, and up to ten times what could be earned in agriculture.

To pull all this off, Chaudhary made contact, in 2005, with Harold Rosen, who directs a highly-regarded social enterprise called Grassroots Business Fund. Having spent two decades as director of emerging markets investments for the International Finance Corporation (a member of the World Bank Group), Rosen had been a pioneer in the field of microfinance for social enterprises.

In Jaipur Rugs, Rosen believed he’d spotted a strategy that had staying power—and that could be applied to other businesses. “No one could question Chaudhary’s bona fides—his values, vision, and social impact,” Rosen says, “but running a company requires more than that; there’s a certain amount of blocking and tackling involved.” For a year and a half, Rosen’s firm helped Chaudhary navigate the complexities of what he called “triple-bottom-line accounting,” in which financial, environmental, and social impact all play a part. Then, in 2008, Rosen invested in JRC. The amount is undisclosed, but it was enough to make Jaipur Rugs the largest in GBF’s portfolio today, a position that Rosen expects JRC to maintain.

Mr. Chaudhary still makes regular trips to the villages. Here in Dhanota, with his branch manager, Harphool, he checks on the quality and precision of the artisans’ weaving. photo courtesy of Jaipur Rugs Co.

Just as Rosen’s firm was helping Chaudhary move into his next phase of business development, JRC fell on some tough times. Around the world, wholesale customers were tuning into the issues surrounding child labor, suddenly boycotting handmade rugs in favor of cheap, machine-made carpets. “Profit margins were slipping,” Chaudhary says, “and we no longer understood what the customer wanted. We wondered if we were going to survive.”

THE VALUE OF VALUES

In India—where villagers are all too happy to learn a trade while they are young—defining what is and is not child labor can be tricky. photo courtesy of Jaipur Rugs Co.

In 2010, Chaudhary made a fortunate connection. Bain & Company, a Boston-based global consulting firm, had organized a meeting in Rajasthan with social, religious, government, and business leaders, to help them cope with a fast-changing global economy. While attending the meeting, Chaudhary and his daughter, Kavita, hit it off with Bain’s partners; they invited the Bain team to visit JRC headquarters, and to then take a field trip to a weaving village. Impressed by how closely Chaudhary had preserved his original intent, the consultants asked him to teach other big-company executives how to clarify a company’s mission, and stick with it. In exchange, Bain provided services to JRC pro-bono.

At Bain’s suggestion, Chaudhary set up a social enterprise, the Jaipur Rug Foundation, to expand JRC’s work in labor rights, human rights, sustainable development, and the elimination of corruption in business. Bain also helped Chaudhary lay down an unusual mission statement, making it clear that the weavers’ welfare came before profit, and before growth, and that this was non-negotiable. “I had no confidence in what I was doing,” Chaudhary says, “until the Bain people tell me that I am doing it right. It made a big difference for me.”

Despite Chaudhary’s efforts, over the next few years the child-labor stigma that surrounded India’s hand-knotted rugs continued to grow. This was partly spurred by Harvard University’s Siddharth Kara, an international expert on human trafficking and modern slavery, who released a report in 2014 entitled “Tainted Carpets: Slavery and Child Labor in India’s Hand-Made Carpet Sector.” The report stated that 28 million carpet slaves were working under conditions that “were nothing short of sub-human.”

When Kara traced carpets from factories using bonded and child labor to big box stores and other large retailers, those retailers cancelled their orders. Then, instead of mending their ways, some of the carpet exporters quickly changed their names and were back in business.

Even before Kara published his findings, carpet exporters had joined organizations that purported to scrutinize their supply chains. Those that did not show evidence of child slavery could be certified accordingly, and their carpets labeled as clean. Through advertising campaigns, consumers were encouraged to check for these labels, but the system was far from foolproof. The certifying organizations collected fees from both carpet exporters and retailers, creating what some—including Chaudhary—thought was a perverse incentive to turn a blind eye. It would be impossible, explained Yash Ranga, JRC’s “director of stakeholder engagement,” for any certifying body to effectively inspect a disparate supply chain stretching across tens of thousands of miles, incorporating artisans and handlooms in hundreds of villages.

A skilled weaver ties about 360 knots an hour. An 8 X10 rug with 200 knots per square inch will take approximately 3,000 hours to weave. photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

CHILD LABORERS OR APPRENTICES?

Our trip from Jaipur to Aaspura took a little over an hour. At one point, we joined a few artisans at a loom that already held several feet of knotting—the beginning of an abstract design suggesting a clearing sky after a heavy rain. I was still admiring the complexity of the pattern when the women invited me to try making my own knots at the loom.

Even the eldest of them could pretzel themselves onto the plank with ease, their buttocks nearly grazing the ground; my fruitless efforts to approximate this position provided considerable entertainment. Eventually, I was close enough to the loom to attempt a knot, with fingers that felt as nimble as sausages. An experienced weaver can tie six or more complex knots a minute. When I finally got one awkward slipknot tied, everyone cheered.

As the women worked, a little girl sat between her mother and her aunt—seemingly content but perilously close to a flying, scythe-shaped knife that the weavers use to clip the tail off every knot. Quickly, Jain shooed the child away. “There was a time,” she said, “when children were forced to be part of this trade. But today, this is no longer the case. Now, there are random checks by the government, and if child labor is seen, the carpet distributor can be blacklisted.”

In Rajastan weaving villages, handlooms are typically inside the house. This way, the women (who always do the weaving) can work at home and oversee their household responsibilities. In rural India, women often earn half or more of what is available to the family. photo courtesy of Jaipur Rugs Co.

I would soon learn that things weren’t quite that simple. For starters, defining what is —and what is not —child labor is a troublesome matter in India.

By Indian law, children who are 14 and over are permitted to work. And in most communities, they must contribute substantially to the family’s income to assure a degree of financial stability. This is one reason why Chaudhary could not endorse the basic premise of the carpet-certifying organizations—that children, guided by their relatives, should be prohibited from apprenticing at the looms. In economically advantaged societies, where higher education is available, this might make sense. But in remote areas, where jobs for women are unavailable, and educational opportunities sparse, a young girl’s best opportunity to develop employable skills is often alongside her mother.

Granted, there is self-interest involved; by training young weavers, Jaipur Rugs maintains an enduring labor pool. Still, Chaudhary firmly believes that when children know that paying work awaits, they are more likely to remain in their rural villages, rather than emigrating to the cities, where conditions for the barely-educated rural poor are invariably worse. [For a complete discussion of the situation, please see our sidebar, “The Child Labor Dilemma.”]

In the midst of these child-labor squabbles, Bain’s consultants suggested that, instead of mimicking his competitors’ duck-and-cover approach, Chaudhary treat the situation as a marketing opportunity: Why not emphasize the ways that his company was helping families?

This girl proudly showed me the award that her mother, Sajna, won for one of her Artisan Originals rugs. “We handpicked these weavers,” said JRC’s Meghna Jain, “and we said, ‘you go and create whatever you want to create on that rug.’ It’s all in their minds – the hills, and roses, and lotus, and animals.” photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

“HAPPY, HAPPY”

After my lunch in Aaspura, I’d barely licked the shakarpara’s sweetness from my lips when two small girls rushed over to place a bindi on my forehead, the colored dot that married women wear to fend off bad luck. Three toddlers promptly crawled into my lap. “Kushi kushi,” the women said. “Happy, happy,” Jain translated. “They say, ‘now you have some grandchildren.”

Insignificant as it may sound to Westerners, it’s a big deal here that this woman can make decisions about how her household runs, and travel for work on her own. Her mother was not permitted to “step out” of her home—literally, to cross its threshold.

Tugging me to my feet, the girls led me down puddled streets, past skinny cows, rusty bicycles and motorbikes, and glossy-coated, long-eared goats, to show me the handlooms in the courtyards of their homes, all of which were swept clean. The looms were striking things—constructed from rough-hewn branches and tree trunks, their warps strung with long, thick threads of cotton. Children were everywhere—on hips, in arms, on backs. Their clothes were clean, and often neatly ironed. Unlike the kids I’d seen on city streets, no one was emaciated or staring glassy-eyed.

In a rush of enthusiasm, a teenage girl proudly showed me a framed award that her mother, Sajna, had won in 2016. Jain explained that some years ago, Sajna had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. After four months of medical treatment, which left her depleted and depressed, JRC invited her to weave a rug of her own design. Her creation depicted the organs of her body, as she imagined them, set among flowers and plants.

Once the rug was completed, Françoise Aubry, the curator of the Horta Museum in Brussels, purchased the work. (The price is unknown, but tribal carpets of this kind, made from rough wool, are typically less expensive than Jaipur Rugs’ high-end carpets, costing around $4,000.) When I asked Aubry what had drawn her, she wrote: “I have no passion for rugs, but I have found in the work of Sajna a spirit and a freshness that touched my heart immediately.”

Yoga classes aside, our author found it surprisingly challenging to sit on the weaving plank, a narrow, rough board a few inches off the floor, placed within 18” of the loom. The plank is a recent addition to most looms. Neck, back, shoulder, knee, and hip problems plague many weavers. photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

SCALING UP THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

On my last morning in India, I returned to JRC’s head office for a look at its finished rugs, and for a final chat with Chaudhary. My driver turned off the main thoroughfare, into the modern neighborhood of Mansarovar, where boxy white condos and high-rise shopping malls stood between empty lots. Driving down a bumpy street, through a guard gate, we entered the driveway of the commercial and industrial complex that includes the Chaudharys’ family home.

StartiI arrived at 8:30 am, just as the first employees were starting to pass through the gate. Chaudhary’s daughter, Kavita, who is the company’s design director, started my tour in the carpet display room, where, with a grand thump and roll, several beautiful specimens from her “Kavi Collection”—joyful explosions of texture and color in wool and silk—were presented for my inspection. We sat cross-legged on a carpet that had recently returned from the finishing plant. I was hoping to stay where I was, petting the rug’s silky softness, but I instead followed Kavita into the design room, where brilliantly-colored, pixelated patterns were undergoing modification on a dozen computer monitors.

Tying hundreds of thousands of tiny knots requires dexterity and rigorous focus. The work is exacting, but mechanical, and spending months knotting hundreds of yards of yarn can feel both soulless and endless. To facilitate the work, JRC employs huge printers, which spew out rainbow-colored paper maps that weavers use to guide them, pixel by pixel, stitch by stitch. Each square of the map represents an inch of knotting, and the color key tells the weaver which hank of wool or silk is up next. The system reminded me of the paint-by-number kits of my youth. [To watch this process unfold, please click on our mini-documentary “India’s New Carpet Weavers.”]

Starting in 2010, JRC decided to give a group of artisans, selected from a special training session, a chance to weave carpets of their own design, without guidance from the colored maps. This too was a big first. A weaver named Mamtra said that when she faced the empty strings on the loom, she experienced an overwhelming sense of anxiety, and stopped eating and sleeping. “But when I finally got started,” she said, “it seemed like bliss to me.” Rugs made by these weavers were then marketed under a separate line, called Artisan Originals.

This rug was designed by JRC’s design director, Kavita Chaudhary, who was inspired by the evolving patterns that a lighted candle makes when reflected through a prism of glass. The rug, named Thea, is part of Chaudhary’s Chaos Theory collection. It is knotted with hand-carded wool and “bamboo” silk, also known as viscose. photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

In jewel tones, with rust and brown, the artisans made rugs that reflected the particulars of their lives: hills, roses, lotus flowers, goats, cows, dogs, cooking vessels and utensils, even the ever-present shakapara. The designs were perfectly imperfect, said Jain, “and they created a craze. They sold out. People saw great beauty in their authenticity.” Each rug was shipped with a personal note from the artisan who made it, and customers often wrote back, enclosing snapshots of the rugs on the floors of their homes.

The Artisan Originals program, which began as way to take the edge off the tedium of hand-knotting, soon became a centerpiece of JRC’s marketing campaigns. In 2017, at the Carpet Design Awards at Domotex in Hanover, Germany, an event that is widely regarded as the Oscars of the international carpet avant-garde, a collection of Kavita’s designs called “Unstring,” with nearly 200,000 asymmetric knots of hand-carded, hand-spun wool and bamboo silk in every square meter, won Best Modern Collection out of 386 entries from 21 countries. It was the first Indian collection to ever win this award. Two other rugs, which Kavita conceived of after crushing foil paper and observing how the light fell on the resulting creases and crevices, were also Domotex winners. Suddenly, JRC carpets had achieved the status of an authentic luxury brand.

The awards made JRC the darling of the international design community, but Chaudhary was equally excited about the success of one Aaspura weaver (Bimla Devi), whose rug won the German Design Award, beating 5,000 applicants from 56 countries. Accompanied by Kavita, Bimla traveled from rural Rajasthan to Frankfurt to collect her prize before a cheering audience. In September of 2018, several other weavers will travel to Paris to participate in a design trade show where JRC will set up a loom and a spinning wheel. The weavers will demonstrate how they tie knots, and visitors will be encouraged to test the dexterity of their own fingers.

PROGRESS OR ILLUSION?

Jharokha, from JRC’s Tattvam collection, was named after a common feature in Rajastan architecture: an overhanging stone balcony that is enclosed and includes windows. This rug was designed, in 2018, by Gauri Khan, an Indian film producer and interior designer. photo courtesy of Jaipur Rugs Co.

Jaipur Rug Company’s marketing campaign features eye-catching photography of women in their villages, both at their looms and going about their lives. The photos are gritty and beautiful, full of texture and color. In each ad, the company’s motto, “Made with a family’s blessing” drives the message home.

To introduce people to the scenes that make such photos possible, and to prove they are real, JRC regularly takes visitors to the company’s weaving villages, sometimes setting out on multi-day treks. “They can come for as many days as they like,” Jain explained, “and see as many villages as they wish, and question the weavers directly to understand the conditions.”

During my trip to Aaspura, Jain introduced me to a woman named Prem Devi, who at the age of 33 became the village’s bunkar sakhi, or “weaver’s friend”—JRC’ version of a Quality Assurance Officer. (JRC employs a bunkar sakhi in all of its weaving villages.) As was common for village girls, Prem’s schooling was limited; it ended in fifth grade, before she was literate, but through the Jaipur Rug Foundation’s adult education program she had learned to read and write.

In a culture where, for a woman, such a job is an anomaly, Prem Devi holds a newfound position of respect—from both her mother-in-law and her husband. Insignificant as it may sound to Westerners, it’s a big deal here that Prem can make decisions about how her household runs, and travel for work on her own. Her mother, Prem Devi explains, was not permitted to “step out” of her home—literally, to cross its threshold.

The foyer at JRC’s head office prominently features a working handloom. Visitors—weavers in from the village for educational programs, investors, designers, and tourists—are all encouraged to tie a few knots. JRC believes that the more people know about the process, and weavers’ lives, the better it is for the company. photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

A PROMISE, OR A TEASE?

These principles, attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, are posted along the staircase at the head office. Each employee sees them on the way in to work, and on the way out. They also are likely to run into Mr. Chaudhary, whose family residence is on the ground floor of the same building. photo by Cathryn J. Ramin

Over the next four years, under a U.N. program called Every Woman, Every Child, JRC will provide job training to 4,000 women, functional literacy to 2,000, and access to healthcare to 12,000 women and children. JRC is also working with several other U.N.-affiliated organizations to help businesses throughout southeast Asia and Africa operate with a greater sense of social responsibility

When I asked Natalie Africa, the U.N. program’s senior director of global health and private sector engagement, what made JRC stand out, she said, “It’s Mr. Chaudhary, who set up a company for the specific purpose of serving people who are ignored and neglected, and have nothing.” William Kennedy, the senior program officer at the United Nations Office for Partnerships, where he is responsible for a large portfolio of global development projects, was even more expansive. “I think these guys are about as committed to an inclusive social enterprise as anybody I’ve ever met,” he said. “They’re engaging tens of thousands of marginal, rural artisans, giving them an opportunity for a decent livelihood, and focusing on the socioeconomic development of their communities. They’re allowing women to contribute to the socioeconomic welfare of their households and communities, in a very significant way. I mean, maybe there are better examples out there, but I’m not aware of any.”

At this point, I could sense I was on verge of a love fest, so I tried to take a hard look at the facts. Without a doubt, women who would have remained illiterate and restricted were getting educated and traveling to big cities in both India and Europe. They would see a much larger world, filled with riches, far removed from their own lives, and bring news of it back to their families. In the end, this was bound to be a mixed blessing. It would open their eyes, not only to what Westerners take for granted but also to what is likely to remain forever out of their reach.

Regardless of how one feels about those outcomes, a large piece of this achievement belongs to Jaipur Rugs. Through its founder’s efforts, clearly heartfelt from the beginning, the company has successfully re-conceptualized what it means for India’s underclass—including its children—to learn a craft and live a dignified life.

When unskilled, barely literate Dalit leave their villages to go to the cities, Mr. Chaudhary says, bad things happen. “I don’t think they have a good life. It’s very crowded. It’s hard to find the right job.” photo courtesy of Jaipur Rugs Co.

LOVE

In our final moments together before I head for the airport, I ask Chaudhary whether the work with the U.N. organizations will be his legacy. A humble man, he shrugs. “I am not interested to talk about legacy,” he says. “That is for my children to decide.” Instead, he returns to the subject of love. “People were thinking that I was senseless and not a businessman, because I never talk about business,” he says. “The weavers gave me love, and I could give it back. That is why we can produce quality items and on-time deliveries. That is why we have we have been so successful.”

Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, an investigative journalist, is the author of “Crooked” and “Carved in Sand.” She currently writes about travel, culture, art, and craft.

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